The Midwest's Best Cookie Recipes

This cookie, from Lindsay's Chocolate Cafe and Coffee House in O'Fallon, Missouri, wowed us with its flavor-packed lineup of ingredients. "These are the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever had! " says one of our website reviewers. "These are wonderful with a glass of cold milk while the cookie is still warm!"

These cookies come with a friendly warning: Chewy caramel, toasted pecans and a flurry of sea salt will make you popular. Very popular. A product called caramel bits gives these cookies great flavor and chewy texture. Some supermarkets carry them, and they’re widely available online. (Search for Kraft Caramel Bits.) Take care to follow recipe directions when baking: caramel bits melt quickly.

"I love caramel, nuts and chocolate," says the Mandan, North Dakota, reader who sent this recipe to a Midwest Living® cookie contest. Fantasy Chocolate-Caramel Delights were one of the highest-rated cookies in the contest.

Because this recipe makes so many cookies, you might want to freeze some dough for future use. Store in an airtight container in refrigerator for up to one week. Or freeze in a freezer container for up to 6 months; thaw in refrigerator before use.

A Hanover, Kansas, reader sent the recipe for these chocolate cookies with peanut butter centers to a Midwest Living® cookie contest. A judge described them as "regally rich chocolate with a peanut butter kick."

Carol Schneider of Wausau, Wisconsin, brought home a blue ribbon when she entered these cookies at the Wisconsin State Fair. The recipe combines white and semisweet chocolate with dried cherries and walnuts.

The recipe for these big, soft sugar cookies was contributed by Mellissa Deyo, former owner of Jerabek's Bohemian Coffeehouse and Bakery in Saint Paul. "It's my Great-Aunt Hilda's recipe, which has been in my dad's family for 50 years or more," Mellissa says. "It's my favorite!"

What makes these cookies so awesome? "Special ingredients," says the Marion, Ohio, reader who contributed the recipe, which includes chocolate and peanut butter. "I like them because they're decadent yet so easy to make."

Chocolate chips, peanut butter and oatmeal pack these cookies from a Door County, Wisconsin, bed-and-breakfast. Because this recipe makes so many cookies, you might want to freeze some dough for future use.

Orange and chocolate: a cookie match that tempts everyone to take seconds. This recipe comes from Jill Drury in Milwaukee, who loved to bake cookies with her grandmother. "For the longest time I couldn't decide which cookie I liked best, until one day Grandma had me mix my favorite flavors: chocolate and orange," she says.

Crisp on the outside and fudgy on the inside, these easy drop cookies feature semisweet chocolate pieces as well as peanut butter-flavored pieces. Unsweetened cocoa powder punches up the chocolate flavor.

To shape these treats, bake peanut butter cookie dough in a small muffin pan, and then sink in miniature peanut butter cups. No muffin pan? Just roll the dough into a ball and bake on greased cookie sheets.

Dried cherries make oatmeal cookies even more memorable in this recipe from American Spoon Foods, which has locations in the Traverse City, Michigan, area. We like the cookies' crisp edges and chewy centers.

These cookies are almost like a miniature carrot cake. Top them with orange frosting and finely shredded orange peel for a cookie that's as beautiful as it is delicious.

This recipe is from Nancee Allan of Centertown, Missouri, and "dates back to the 1940s at least," she says. "My mother, Helen Kaufmann, and our next-door neighbor, Georgia Mae Wenkle, used to bake a lot of desserts. This was one of our favorites."